NYIT Builds Campus Wide Trust with the Help of Tambellini Membership

“There’s this deep appreciation for the fact that we reached out to somebody who is an expert. Now there is this level of trust that is deep and wide. Going forward with an implementation gave us an opportunity to quickly build trust across the campus. Something that would have taken years to do on our own.“

Becky Frieden
Senior Director of Enterprise Applications and Decision Support Systems, NYIT

About the Institution

New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) is the home of makers, doers, inventors, and innovators. The research, STEM-focused university has been dedicated to educating the next generation of leaders since its founding in 1955. In the 66 years since its establishment, NYIT has expanded to five locations, two being international. The future-focused institution hopes to help its students grow as people, citizens, and professionals.

Background

Becky Frieden, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications and Decision Support Systems at NYIT, was no stranger to Tambellini Group (Tambellini) when she arrived at the institution. In fact, Becky was confident that NYIT’s long-standing Tambellini membership would be a valuable tool in helping her achieve success in her new role. As an established leader in the IT world and a former member at her previous institution, Frieden looked forward to engaging with analysts who had a deep understanding of the higher education market and sharing research with her colleagues across campus.

The role of a campus IT leader is not only time-consuming but changes day-to-day. As one of those leaders, Becky views her role as multidimensional. “It is not just what I am doing today. It’s also what are other schools doing, why, and where is the market-leading us?’ I see that as a critical part of my role, and I can’t do it on my own.”

Services in Action

In 2021, NYIT began to question the quality and usefulness of its finance and HCM systems. The team was able to use Tambellini research to learn more about the vendors and solutions available in the market, but they understood that figuring out the next steps would require some additional support. If the institution was going to consider a change to their administrative systems, they needed a voice of authority outside of campus to help deepen their understanding of the technology and people needs. According to Frieden, “The cultural change is almost as important as the technology change, and that’s what Tambellini really brought to us—the ability to understand the meaning of people and technology and guide us on that journey.”

With the help of Tambellini’s vendor agnostic approach and rich knowledge of the higher education space, the institution kicked off an ERP Readiness Assessment project. Today, Tambellini’s CEO and other members of their advisory team are gathering knowledge and engaging with a large part of the campus through interviews with department members about challenges, processes, culture, and what they like and do not like about the current system. With this information, Tambellini analysts will develop an extensive assessment that will be the launching point and blueprint for future technology selection projects.

At the same time NYIT is considering another technology change within its admissions department. While the current system meets their needs, the team is interested to know what else the market offers. During their research for this project, Freiden and her team discovered a company that they were not familiar with in the recruitment and admissions space. Rather than spend time researching the organization and its products, Freiden called their Tambellini Strategic Advisor and was able to connect with an analyst who provided extensive information about the company and its solution. “All of a sudden, we had a full picture of the organization and its solution, and that was 100 percent because of our relationship with Tambellini.” As reported by Freiden, their Strategic Advisor has helped the team save time and provided additional insights on specific topic areas.

Conclusion

Freiden states that the most impactful result NYIT has seen since becoming a member of Tambellini is the engagement with market experts. These engagements have helped them build trust in a significantly faster way across campus. The engagements also helped her and the CIO increase their knowledge and skills to make better-informed decisions quickly.

Tambellini hits the sweet spot for NYIT and its IT team. With the success of their current projects, the team is excited to see how Tambellini can help them in even more areas, such as integration as a platform, single sign-on, and more. “The value add Tambellini gives us is the analyst time and those deep dives we get. There is real value in that mentoring for senior-level people.”